Feedback
JOURNAL OF THE MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN
Features: Jack Self Greg Lynn Christine Wamsler Nicole Lambrou
Vol 05 November 2018
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FEEDBACK
Inflection Journal Volume 05 - Feedback November 2018
Inflection is published annually by the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne and AADR: Art Architecture Design Research. Editors: Lucia Amies, Samuel Chesbrough, Sarah Mair, Olivia Potter, William Ward Editorial Advisor and Sub-editor: Amelia Willis Academic Advisor: Dr. AnnMarie Brennan Academic Advisory Board: Dr. AnnMarie Brennan Prof. Alan Pert Acknowledgements: The editors would like to thank all those involved in the production of this journal for their generous assistance and support. For all enquiries please contact: editorial@inflectionjournal.com inflectionjournal.com facebook.com/inflectionjournal/ instagram.com/inflectionjournal/ © Copyright 2018 ISSN 2199-8094 ISBN 978-3-88778-547-5 AADR – Art, Architecture and Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice. AADR Curatorial Editor: Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. Print run 2018 Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany. Graphic design in collaboration with Büro North Interdisciplinary Design No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder.
Cover image: Studio IMG.ING, South Lawn car park, University of Melbourne, 2017. Point cloud scan by FARO. Image reproduced with author’s permission. Inside cover: Studio IMG.ING, South Lawn car park, University of Melbourne, 2017. Point cloud scan by FARO. Image reproduced with author’s permission.
The opinions expressed in Inflection are those of the authors and are not endorsed by the University of Melbourne.
CONTRIBUTORS
Alexander Ford Alexander Ford is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Arizona. Alexander completed a Bachelor of Science in Architecture at the University of Arizona in 2014. He received a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation. Together with Nicholas Gervasi, he was awarded the Cleo and James Marston Fitch Prize for their joint studio project.
Hamish Lonergan Hamish Lonergan is a recent architectural graduate from the University of Queensland, where he was awarded the QIA Medallion. His current research and writing explores architecture, taste, social media and aesthetics, alongside his professional work in public architecture and planning at COX.
Alice Schenk-Green Alice Schenk-Green completed graduate study at the University of Melbourne and has since worked at Jolson Architecture. Previous work with Peter McIntyre and curation of the House of Ideas exhibition encouraged her interest in local architecture, particularly after experiences of living in North America provided alternative perspectives on Melbourne’s identity.
Isabella Ascenzo Isabella Ascenzo is a Master of Architecture student at the University of Melbourne. She works at the Melbourne-based residential architecture firm SLAB. Isabella has an interest in conceptual architecture that challenges norms and empowers those who are marginalised or forgotten in society.
Christine Wamsler Christine Wamsler is an expert in sustainable urban development and resilience. She is Professor of Sustainability Science at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, Sweden. Christine is trained as an architect and urban planner. She holds a Master in International Humanitarian Assistance, a Ph.D on Urban Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation and a postdoctoral lecture qualification in Sustainability Science.
Jack Self Jack Self is a prolific London-based architect and author. He is the director of REAL Foundation, a cultural institute and architectural practice notable for its critical approach to architecture and design. With design studio OKRM, REAL Foundation were responsible for the British Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 entitled Home Economics. They have also published six issues of their magazine REAL Review.
Curtis Roth Curtis Roth is an Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University and a resident fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude. His work attempts to make visible, and thus mutable, the infrastructures that underwrites post-internet architectural labour. This research has been published in Volume, PIDGIN, PLAT and Thresholds, and has been exhibited at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, at the Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura in Mexico City and at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.
James Bowman Fletcher James Bowman Fletcher is a member of the Office of Culture, Technology and Architecture (OCTA) and a Design Studio Leader at Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. James is also one of the founding directors of the non-for-profit, cultural discourse platform Parallel _ For Thinking (2016). He studied at Monash University and the University of California, Berkeley. His work focusses on architecture’s role in normalising relationships and behaviour in space as it shapes and modifies everyday life.
Greg Lynn Greg Lynn is the Ordentlicher University Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, a Studio Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and the director of Greg Lynn Form. He holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton. Greg has been involved in the design of high performance boats, intelligent furniture for Nike and autonomous mobility aides with Piaggio Fast Forward.
Jil Raleigh Jil Raleigh is a practicing architect and engineer, as well as an occasional writer and (very) amateur game designer based in Melbourne. She works at BKK Architects, predominantly in infrastructure, urban design and public architecture. Her side projects include co-editing Inflection (Volume 3: New Order) and working as a production assistant for Triple R’s The Architects. Jil explores ideas of public engagement and equity in the built environment.
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Joseph Norster Joe Norster is a co-founder of These Are The Projects We Do Together and leads a team that delivers projects with complex programs across a range of scales and timeframes. In a career that has focussed on delivering complex, small projects to public and private clients within the arts and architecture, he specialises in working with local government teams and navigating the relationships that develop around site and place.
Olivia Potter Olivia Potter is a Master of Architecture student at the University of Melbourne and a current editor of Inflection. In 2017 she received a Dean’s Award for her studies. Her work was displayed in Federation Square after her team was short-listed for Melbourne’s Backyard Ideas Competition. She is heavily left-handed and her hair currently hosts the winning cut of the Melbourne Hair Expo Mullet Competition.
Joshua Bolchover Joshua Bolchover is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. With John Lin, he leads the nonprofit research lab Rural Urban Framework (RUF) at HKU. They specialise in sensitive, calculated projects in rural areas. Joshua has published widely with John Lin and others, and has previously taught at the Architectural Association and Cambridge University.
Nicole Lambrou Nicole Lambrou is a practicing architect, urban designer and researcher. Her practice tinkercraft attempts to reveal and question the relationship between people, institutions and the makings of natures through design and research. Her writing and projects focus on how the politics of climate shape urban environmental transformations. She documents the work of design and planning professionals and everyday urban dwellers in making new natures in their cities and explores the values that drive their efforts.
Kevin Jones Kevin Jones, AIA is an architect and Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where he teaches Integrative Design Lab and Professional Practice. His experience includes numerous adaptive re-use projects as well as housing, institutional, community and cultural works. He has worked with urban and rural communities internationally on student–led design projects. He prefers white trace paper over yellow.
Nicholas Gervasi Nicholas Gervasi is an architect at Terreform ONE. Nicholas earned his Master of Architecture from Tulane University in 2012. He received a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation. Together with Alexander Ford, he was awarded the Cleo and James Marston Fitch Prize for their joint studio project.
Michael Thorpe Michael Thorpe graduated with a Master of Architecture from the University of Melbourne and now predominantly works on rail infrastructure and micro housing at Grimshaw Architects. He is interested in the interface with industrial design and architecture, and has exhibited his design work in Finland, the UK, Italy and Australia. His work has featured in publications such as The New York Times, ArchDaily and Dezeen.
Sarah Hirschman Sarah Hirschman is an architect and researcher based in California. She is the 2017–18 Howard E. LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University, where she has recently opened Paranomasiac. She received a Master of Architecture from MIT and a Master of Arts in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. She has taught design studios at MIT, UC Berkeley and the Ohio State University, and her work has been published in Clog, Thresholds, Architect Magazine and Future Anterior.
Millie Cattlin Millie Cattlin is a co-founder of These Are The Projects We Do Together. She is fascinated with buildings and infrastructure, as opposed to architecture, and is driven to design projects that support and enable creativity and accessibility. Her first building as an architect was a temporary public toilet at Testing Grounds—leveraging an existing budget allocation for 12 months of Portaloo hire. It is a humble structure, defined by generosity and softness in public space. Six years later it’s still there.
William Ward William Ward is a Master of Architecture student at the University of Melbourne and a current editor of Inflection. He holds a Bachelor of Architectural Design from the University of Queensland. In the past, he has worked for Twohill and James in Brisbane. His current area of interest is design knowledge, which he plans to continue researching into the future.
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CONTENTS
06 08 10
Editorial
Olivia Potter Notes on Point Clouds
Sarah Hirschman Harold as Feedback’s Foil: Improvisational Comedy and Architecture
16 24 34 42
Jack Self With Great Power…
Kevin Jones Territories of Feedback: Process, Project and Pedagogy in the Design of a New University Library in Malawi, Africa Curtis Roth Ten Outsourced Interiors: On the Disentanglement of Creative Expression from Productive Labour
Alice Schenk-Green and Michael Thorpe 200 Years of Identity
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William Ward A Red Wine Cheers: To the Intimacies of Industry
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Joshua Bolchover On Frameworks
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60 66 76
Hamish Lonergan Fuck Yeah Hume: Architectural Taste on Social Media
Joseph Norster and Millie Cattlin Analogue Loop: These Are The Projects We Do Together
Nicole Lambrou Making Landscapes Legible: An Ecology of Feedback Loops
Isabella Ascenzo How to Survive Aleppo
Jil Raleigh Treeplayer: Reconnecting People and Trees Through Sound
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Greg Lynn The Future of Craft
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Christine Wamsler On Resilience and Natural Disasters
110 116
James Bowman Fletcher Boiling Water: Contemporary Society’s Misplaced Preoccupation With Time-Saving Devices Alexander Ford and Nicholas Gervasi Experimental Preservation: Architectural Assimilation of an Ephemeral Monument Through Experimental Preservation
EDITORIAL Lucia Amies, Samuel Chesbrough, Sarah Mair, Olivia Potter and William Ward Inanimate data can never speak for themselves, and we always bring to bear some conceptual framework, either intuitive and ill-formed, or tightly and formally structured, to the task of investigation, analysis, and interpretation. —Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. At present, the term ‘big data’ is virtually ubiquitous: think Cambridge Analytica, social credit and crime prevention systems powered by exhaustive data collection and targeted advertising in our email. Inflection vol. 5: Feedback is an exploration of how designers might manifest this trend within the built environment. Once the purview of software engineers and data scientists, trends in feedback collection, use and theory are now being influenced by designers, while their everyday practice is increasingly concerned with its outcomes. While we speculate about the boundaries of design’s future, we also critique its present and revisit its past. The original provocation for this volume of Inflection used Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s unbuilt Fun Palace project as a framework for speculation. The project was a tongue-in-cheek (but also deadly serious) reaction to the marked increase in available leisure time in the post-World War II era. The allure and the life of the project (arguably) are not found in its architectural expression, but in Price and Littlewood’s utopian aspiration for the truly free society that it would facilitate. The data used here, however rudimentary, is just the glue that holds the project together—data is not just referred to, but utilised to achieve a defined ideological goal. Regardless of whether the data designers work with is ‘low’ or ‘high’ tech, what matters more is the conceptual framework they adopt to organise and prioritise that data. Data analytics might be a more technically sophisticated methodology than a participatory design consultation, but that alone does not guarantee a positive outcome for each 06
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stakeholder in a project. There is a pressing need for designers to re-engage with multidisciplinary theories and concepts that can help them take rigorous, principled positions on the increasingly difficult conditions of the “wicked problems” they encounter.1 Sometimes, we draw such models from counter-intuitive sources: Hamish Lonergan contends that 18th century philosopher David Hume’s theory of taste and criticism informs our understanding of the oft-maligned style of architectural conjecture that we find in our social media feed. In the same vein, Sarah Hirschman demonstrates how a methodology borrowed from improvisational comedy could encourage a more egalitarian approach to the everyday practice of design. The wealth of new data and feedback methodologies accessible to designers can enrich well-established modes of practice. Kevin Jones details how a conceptual understanding of feedback loops helped inform his design team’s approach to replacing the fire-ravaged campus library at Mzuzu University in Malawi, Africa. Here, structured and reflective collaboration with stakeholders and clients ultimately enriched the methodologies of each designer’s practice. In a similar vein, Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster demonstrate how Price and Littlewood’s ambitions might translate to a contemporary, pragmatic context. As part of their work establishing their Melbourne-based exhibition space Testing Grounds, they have designed a space for flexibility and creative expression that is firmly grounded in modularity, affordability and practicality. Designers could acquiesce to a popular consensus dictated by political or economic influences; but the practice of design is uniquely positioned to critique, and maybe even start to arrest, the more undesirable directions that we find our society heading. Jil Raleigh discusses how the TreePlayer app she helped develop fosters a cultural awareness of nature in Melbourne’s CBD, using a combination of publicly-available data and design ingenuity. Similarly, Nicole Lambrou posits
that deploying smart technology in eco-engineered landscape design can play a pivotal role in altering public attitudes towards climatic risk and resilience. In fact, it is the sophisticated knowledge and interpretation of these landscapes that determines our ability to meaningfully affect them. Nicholas Gervasi and Alexander Ford’s project refashions the monument into a dynamic force that speaks to the passage of time. Their proposal counterintuitively seeks to capture a temporal, fleeting phenomenon: a decades-old oil leakage from a wrecked World War II battleship, the U.S.S Arizona, becomes the site for reflection, homage and speculation. Gervasi and Ford imagine a monument that encompasses the present and future, not just the past. Continuing squabbles over data ethics and privacy demonstrate that a proportion of those possibilities might not be all that desirable.2 The daily movements and interactions of warehouse employees are being reduced to an efficiency calculation by sophisticated multinationals like Amazon and productivity gains are becoming dependent on constant surveillance and analysis.3 James Bowman Fletcher focusses on the technical improvements made possible by feedback loops using the seemingly banal task of boiling water, and reflects on how productivity efficiencies that could hypothetically result in the increased free time for workers that is typically re-allocated to contracted time. Aware of their claim to agency, practitioners start to push for a more socially conscious and integrated role for design. In our wide-ranging conversation, author and architect Jack Self suggests that designers can, and should, advocate for an ethical agenda in their projects. Curtis Roth explores the complexities of authorship and design’s submerged complicity for working conditions through an exploration of the thriving art-copying market in Dafen, in the Shenzhen province of China. Roth commissioned Vol 05 Feedback
a series of reproductions from labourers, attaching an accompanying specification requesting that each painter also paint their surroundings, and that the reproduced painting be erased by a separate artist. The result is a series of complex, contradictory portraits that contain traces of the state’s fabricated agenda, the painter’s own intent, the authority of the designer and the squalid living conditions that make it all affordable. Roth’s provocation invites designers to consider the dense web of sociocultural, economic and labour conditions that professional authority distances them from. By no means does Inflection vol. 5 claim to hold the answers to these provocations; rather, it posits a variety of ways to approach them. Our focus here is not so much the outcomes of data-driven design as it is the methodologies, processes and frameworks that designers employ to arrive at them: what do we choose to value, and how are those values expressed in our practice?
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Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–169. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative
Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming 03
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013). Tom Simonite, “Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses,” Wired, https://www.wired. com/story/grasping-robots-compete-to-rule-amazonswarehouses/ (accessed October 16, 2017).
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NOTES ON POINT CLOUDS Olivia Potter The cover image of Inflection vol. 5 is a point cloud representation of the South Lawn at the University of Melbourne Parkville campus, and was generated from a scan produced as part of Ben Waters’ Studio 19: IMG.ING (Semester 2, 2017). Gregg Franz from FARO conducted this scan using LIDAR technology. The car park itself sits below a grassed and tree-lined lawn, used by university students and professors to relax and catch sunlight between classes. These two levels (the car park and the lawn) were scanned separately and—because the technology measures the relative distances of point coordinates—the two scans of South Lawn were able to be stitched together to create a single swarm of points.
runs a three dimensional sweep of its setting. When the laser beam detects it has hit a surface, energy is bounced back to the scanner and a timer records how long this has taken. From this information, a distance can then be calculated to record the location of a single point.2 This process is repeated thousands of times; points are recorded and fed back to the scanning technology to generate a cloud of relative positions in space. Each of these points is accompanied by an RGB reading, produced from a series of photographs taken by the device’s inbuilt camera. This technology creates a highly accurate, fast and detailed three dimensional image of the scanner’s visible physical environment. This data and accompanying process of generating digital feedback holds countless possibilities.
Designed by the architectural firm Loader & Bayley and completed in November 1972, at its time of construction, South Lawn was the only fully enclosed car park in Australia. Marked at one entrance by an 18th century door from Dublin and at another by two statues of Atlas from the demolished Colonial Bank in Elizabeth Street, the otherwise almost hidden interior uses parabolic concrete profiles set on short columns to support the lawn above.1 The car park was used in George Miller’s film Mad Max (1979). A LIDAR Scanner generates a point cloud by emitting rapidly pulsing (or continuous) laser beams towards objects. As it is doing this, the scanner also rotates around its vertical axis. Simultaneously, a mirror moves the scanner up and down. By turning on its horizontal axis, the scanner systematically 01
02 Opposite: Studio IMG.ING, South Lawn car park, University of Melbourne, 2017. Point cloud scan by FARO. Image reproduced with author’s permission.
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Heritage Council Victoria, “Underground Car Park,” Victorian Heritage Database Report (Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, July 27, 2018), http://vhd.heritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/ places/3808/download-report. Leica Geosystems AG, “Laser scanning: Chapter 2 of 3 - How It All Works,” (video) November 20, 2012, accessed July 27, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1lDO1UevAJI.
HAROLD AS FEEDBACK’S FOIL IMPROVISATIONAL COMEDY AND ARCHITECTURE Sarah Hirschman Architects speak about the needs of users with program diagrams in project proposals, and sometimes they perform post-occupancy surveys, but most often the ideas that drive a conceptual design aren’t ever actually tested in a real way, nor do they benefit from feedback. We’re left with a disconnect between intention and results. In comedy, the test of efficacy is immediate and results are clear—if someone laughs at a joke, it’s a success. Looking closely at the way humour works, then, could potentially reveal clues about how architecture might incorporate feedback into its design process. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud writes that the joke is “a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once. Everything in jokes that is aimed at gaining pleasure is calculated with an eye toward the third person […] and this gives us a full impression of how indispensable this third person is for the completion of the joking process.”1 The joke has two-way communication built into it; it is a call that demands a response to properly function. The joke is a social act as well as a creative one. Jokes invite responses, and while they might be quite different from those architects seek to induce, the way they operate as a deliberate exchange of information can teach us something about being consciously responsive in the design process. Feedback generally refers to something exterior to the process of designing—the collection of data from clients or users. Not only does there lack a clear rubric for interpretation of this data, there’s no standard mandate to collect it. How do we weigh the reported experience of one constituency over another, and how do we confirm the conclusions others make? Who decides what data gets collected and how it gets used? This essay proposes a new model for understanding communication and collaboration in the design process following Keller Easterling’s observation: “Architects typically love manners, utopias and crises. We love to make difficult questions harder. We love to train [ourselves] to do labourintensive tasks,” and so “a better role for the architect is not that of an optimizer but that of a comedian.”2 The 10
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architect’s comedy is increasingly conversational, especially as worksharing software like Autodesk Revit imposes a continual call-and-response within the office in its insatiable saving-to-central. Easterling’s “architect-as-comedian” operates just at the threshold of futility, dispensing with traditional “hierarchical, ‘atelier’ culture,” in favour of direct engagement with “larger cultural organizations that actually direct most of the space-making.”3 Improvisation has been present in one form or another within architecture since the middle of the last century; this essay considers a structured subset of improvisational comedy, what might be known as “Chicago-style improv,” for rigorous insight into intentional collaboration, and posit a way in which feedback can thrive within structure. Though the basic tenets of improvisation—spontaneity, use of material at hand—remain relatively consistent, its implications and the way improvised works are received vary widely across creative fields and through time. Where the improvisation of abstract impressionist painters like Jackson Pollock might be said to access deep subconscious knowledge (an individualistic perspective) an alternate approach that became popular in the 1960s regarded improvisation instead as a kind of extreme form of collaboration. According to American Studies professor Daniel Belgrad, “this model privileged ensemble work, typically in performing arts like music and dance. In this kind of work, the artists’ creative ideas were understood to emerge not ‘from the depths’ of the unconscious mind, but from the group dynamic.”4 This emphasized group improvisation as a way to create new works rather than considering improvisation as akin to a revelatory psychoanalysis for an individual to explore. Architecture has flirted with improvisation before. In architect Cedric Price’s Fun Palace project (1964), users were invited to manipulate their environments and create hyper-customized and specific forms that suited their needs. The Fun Palace was, as architectural historian/theorist Harold as Feedback’s Foil
Cedric Price, Fun palace, 1964. Model. Image courtesy of Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.
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The term ‘big data’ is virtually ubiquitous in both cultural and technical contexts. The fifth volume of Inflection is an open-ended investigation into how designers are interpreting and countering the prevailing narrative that pushes for greater efficiency and automation using sophisticated data analytics. Feedback gathers a wide range of responses, united by their collective advocacy for a sophisticated understanding of processes, frameworks and ethics. Inflection is a student-run design journal based at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. Born from a desire to stimulate debate and generate ideas, it advocates the discursive voice of students, academics and practitioners. Founded in 2013, Inflection is a home for provocative writing—a place to share ideas and engage with contemporary discourse.
